Life After Castro at Miami’s Most Famous Cuban Restaurant

After the death of Fidel Castro, last month, a celebration erupted outside the restaurant Versailles, a longtime fixture of Miami’s Cuban-American community.

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE / GETTY

On the night of November 25th, the owners of Versailles, Miami’s most famous Cuban restaurant, were at a Thanksgiving gathering when their phones buzzed with a news alert: Fidel Castro was dead. Nicole Valls, who helps run the restaurant with her father and grandfather, was used to false alarms; since 2006, when rumors of the leader’s ill health first circulated, she’d been keeping a folder in the trunk of her car containing protocol for Versailles in the event of Castro’s passing. Now, once she’d confirmed that Castro was really dead this time, she ran to grab the folder from her car and texted the restaurant’s managers with instructions: the parking lot would have to be cleared to make room for the many news vans that had reserved spaces for the occasion. In the early hours of the 26th, crowds surrounded Versailles, waving Cuban flags, banging out clave rhythms on pots and pans, and joining in chants in Spanish, including “P’arriba, p’abajo, los Castros p’al carajo”—“Up and down, and the Castro brothers can go to hell.” The next day, when celebrations resumed, the restaurant ran out of croquetas by noon.

Nicole’s paternal grandfather, Felipe Valls, Sr., opened Versailles, on Little Havana’s Calle Ocho, in 1971, and in the decades since the restaurant has outlasted most of the local competition. The family today owns forty restaurants around the city, including one just down the block. But it’s their flagship restaurant that has become a de-facto town square for generations of Miami’s Cuban community, and the media’s go-to place for assessing the state of Cuban-American relations. The Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner, a close friend of the Valls family, told me, “How can you effectively reach the exiled community, an abstract concept of two million people spread throughout the world? Versailles is a concrete place that gives sense and form to that abstraction, and the media understand that.”

The restaurant has been an obligatory stop for politicians on the campaign trail since 1986, when the Florida politician Bob Graham, during his run for governor, put on a busboy uniform and worked a shift, wiping down tables and refilling water glasses. In 2000, the restaurant became a fixture of TV news segments during the custody battle over Elián González, when Cuban-Americans in the region rallied behind the boy’s family members in Miami. And in March, when Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. President since Calvin Coolidge to visit Cuba, a group of protesters set up shop across the street from the restaurant, holding signs with messages like “Obama Miserable Comunista.” If Donald Trump attempts to undo Obama’s thawing of relations, as he has suggested he might, media outlets will look to the reactions of Versailles patrons.

But the Valls family knew that the most frenzied activity would come in the wake of Castro’s death. In “The Versailles Restaurant Cookbook,” published two years ago, Nicole Valls and her co-author, the local food and television personality Ana Quincoces, explained that one of the traditions of Versailles customers, especially at its outdoor café window, or ventanita, is “plotting Fidel Castro’s death.” Each time rumors surfaced that Castro had died, they wrote, “people flocked to the restaurant in droves to confirm the story and to celebrate the possibility that it might be true.”

Though my own father liked to slyly refer to Versailles by the nickname El Pentágono, for much of my early life I viewed the restaurant less as a political nerve center than as a place to get consistently good plates of ropa vieja with rice and sweet plantains. Versailles is where my parents, Cuban exiles who left the island in the early sixties and eventually settled in New York, would take the family for dinner whenever we visited cousins in Miami. The restaurant is open until 1 A.M. Sunday through Thursday and even later on weekends, so we’d go there after parties when every other place was closed. The restaurant’s many dining rooms are adorned with chandeliers and other faux-opulent homages to pre-revolutionary Havana, but Versailles, which has about four hundred seats, is really a cafeteria, a protean meeting ground with an inexpensive and expansive menu, plastic breadbaskets, and vinyl chairs. Like the long-standing Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace, in New Orleans, it is a place for regulars who like to stick to their habits. A group of elderly exiles known as the Teen-agers eats lunch there every weekday, and devotees request specific tables based on the strength of the air-conditioning.

It is these old-timers whose political sentiments help to set the tone of Versailles’s coverage in the media. On Election Night, when it became clear that Trump would be the victor, a celebration erupted outside of the restaurant. Though the Cuban-American vote in Florida tipped in favor of the Republican candidate, a majority of Cuban-Americans support Obama’s policies toward the island. But the news stories from Versailles depicted a scene of pro-Trump fervor. Ana María Dopico, a Cuban-American professor at N.Y.U., told me that the media’s relentless focus on Versailles ends up selling a “caricature” of Cuban-American political feeling. The population of the Cuban-American community in Miami-Dade, a Democratic county, hovers close to a million. “The illusion of Versailles as a village square obscures how varied Cuban Miami is, and that Cuban-Americans are not a monolith,” she said.

The Mexican-American journalist and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who has lived in Miami since 1986, told me he’d found the post-Castro moment in Little Havana surprisingly subdued. Twenty years ago, when Castro seemed “all-powerful on the island,” there was a feeling that his passing could instantly provoke change, and inspire a mass immigration back to the island. “There is honor and dignity in confronting the dictator and outlasting the dictator,” Ramos said. But Castro ceded power to his brother Raúl in 2008, and the lessons of post-Hugo Chávez Venezuela made clear that a Cuba without Fidel wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of Castrismo. Felipe Valls, Jr., Nicole’s father and the current head of the company, suggested a similar sense of ruefulness: “Castro lived a long time, and we weren’t able to say, in his face, ‘This is the new Cuba, and screw you.’ ” Exactly what Castro’s death, and Trump’s rise, will mean for Cuban-American relations remains uncertain. Versailles, more than providing campaign stops or media sound bites, will be most useful as a place for Cuban-Americans to process their continued sense of displacement—the trauma and complicated pride that stem from having roots in a country that an increasing number of Miamians never experienced firsthand.

A week and a half after Castro’s death, my parents and I all happened to be in Miami, and I went to sit with them one evening as they ate dinner at Versailles. The room was full. At one table nearby, four grandmothers drank batidos, or milkshakes, with their main courses. I picked at some croquettes, while my dad inhaled a plate of braised oxtail and my mom had filet mignon. At one point, our waiter, a man in his forties wearing the staff’s signature white dress shirt and green cravat, came by to check on us. I asked him about the celebrations earlier in the week, and when he expected Versailles’s next big party would be. “When Raúl goes, I guess,” he said.

Gabe Ulla is a New York-based food writer and the co-author of a forthcoming cookbook from the restaurant Estela.